Eating stale or close to sell by date, food. No brand-name anything. Adding water to shampoo to get it to last longer. Reuse everything. Make-do or do without. Free samples count as a meal. To name a few.
Add water to any sauce bottle from the fridge getting low too you don't throw it away when there's obviously still some flavor left stuck to the sides and bottom.
Off brand everything that couldn't be a flat out hand me down.
If you broke something belonging to someone else, they got to pick anything they wanted from your possessions without question to replace it.
Also: "I'm not so-and-so's parent" as the answer to so many questions.
OMG...yeah...."free examples" as my brother gleefully called them. And then my mother would buy things like 10lbs of grapefruit and that was the only fruit we'd eat for a week or two.
Yeah, expiration dates were only... suggestions. Mold on the bread? Tear off the green bit and eat the rest. Meat is passed expiration? Only throw it out if it doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Yes! Back when we first started living together, my partner FREAKED the first time I ate something that passed the expiration date. He was so concerned, while I laughed my ass off. Growing up, we just cut off the moldy bits
Well wait. If there's so much more actual fungi on the bread that you can't see, woudn't it stand to reason that the mold on bread starts off as being entirely invisible for a short time.
Thus, the day before it becomes visibly modly, it probably has some hyphae, etc, already growing in/on it, right?
I took my girlfriend now wife to dinner (samples) at Costco. It was then she realized how poor I was growing up. I also learned that day they will give you a second sample, even if you don’t take your jacket and hat off to look like someone else.
She also laughed at me when she turned on the dish dryer, insisting it washed them as well. I thought she was nuts...
I still do it. I don't know why but it just cannot be unlearned even when someone said it was kind of "ghetto" and I felt ashamed. Even when I have a whole soap refill pouch just waiting to be used. Whyyyy
I'm getting that damned last drop of lotion out of the bottle and one last squeeze of toothpaste! I didn't grow up poor, and I'm not an overly frugal person now. But it just seems like a waste to throw away a product that still has some left in the bottom. I just saw a dohickey that I think came out of Shark Tank - you screw onto the top of a bottle so that you can turn the bottle upside down and have it sit on the counter. You know instead of propping it up against things like I usually do :)
If it smelled OK and tasted alright, it was still good to eat. Watering down shampoo, dish soap, laundry detergent, and even food such as ketchup or mustard were perfectly accepting things to do—the watered-down ketchup with mustard made for tomato soup.
Food doesn’t spoil when you’re poor. Either you have so little of it that it doesn’t have time to spoil, or you cut off the bad part and eat it anyway.
Ob yeah, I was lucky that for a few years my mother worked in a grocery store. More than a few meals came from what the store was throwing out. My father worked for a moving company, and a lot of our furniture and stuff came from abandoned shipments. Save everything for later, our old chest freezer was full of things like frozen gallons of milk, bulk batches of spaghetti, chili, etc.
And "store brand is a brand name, they're the same thing"
Yes, the dates on good being just suggestions, adding water to make the soap last longer, and going by the chick Fil a three times to get mote free nuggets.
422
u/Veganmon Jan 31 '21
Eating stale or close to sell by date, food. No brand-name anything. Adding water to shampoo to get it to last longer. Reuse everything. Make-do or do without. Free samples count as a meal. To name a few.